Reading Statistics 2017

It's new years eve and the (reading) year is over. That means it's data time! Turns out I'm a huge nerd and love gathering information and visualising it, so let's get to it 😊

Amount of books read: 112

(Thanks, goodreads! Though reading is pretty much it, actually 😂)

I have never before read this many books in a year, so I'm really proud of myself! But let me use this opportunity to mention again: how slow or fast you read or how many or few books, those things are not what defines your worth as a reader. You're welcome in this community no matter these numbers, they don't define you. I made these stats for me, and everything I say about it is in regards to my personal reading experience. I know people for whom 100 is little, and people for whom it's unreachable, and everything in between. (Like me!)

I read a total of 31,479 pages and an average of 281 pages each book. I am, however, a very unreliable reader: I don’t average a certain amount each week or month, which you can see here. I either read nothing or everything, it seems.

Regardless of that, my reading year was pretty good overall! I found some amazing books and my average rating was 3.7. That does mean it went down a bit from last year when I read a lot more four-star books in comparison. I'm taking this to make clear to myself it's okay to not pick up books if I think they'll be just okay. There are so many great books out there, and I'm going to look for them!

As you see, some books have no rating. That usually means I'm conflicted. Either I just really don't know what to do with it, or I think it has issues but I'm not sure yet or didn't feel comfortable giving it a low star rating because of various reasons.
I do usually work with half stars, but as goodreads doesn't really provide that option it wasn't hard figuring out which books to put in which full star categories.

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One-third of the books I read were new releases! I'm pretty impressed. This is definitely due to me getting more involved on goodreads and twitter in the communities and staying on top of new releases more. The two 2018 books were "read now" arcs on NetGalley!
(I know 2015 is usually not long enough ago to be called backlist, but I only wanted specifics for this and last years releases, so here we are.)

I read a lot of relatively short books this year (graphic novels, comics, novellas, poetry, you name it). I always thought the average book was somewhere around 350-450, but my average book didn’t really seem to be. I’m curious to see if this is exceptional or not when I make stats next year.

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I know I read an overwhelming amount of YA, but since that is my go-to age range, I’m actually surprised at how much not YA I read! Look at me being 25% adult. It's also surprising how little middle grade I read, as I always thought I grabbed those for comfort. Obviously, this happened less than I thought. Maybe next year?

As far as authors go, I left room for those who didn’t identify as male nor female, but there were none I knew of this year. I read a total of 19 books by white males, but with six of those, the author had another marginalisation (mainly looking at you, Patrick Ness).
Sadly enough, only 19 books were by authors of colour, which is noticeably lower than the number of books I read that featured characters of colour (33). Realising this, and the discrepancy, I am making it my goal to read more books by authors of colour in 2018. I’ll pay deliberate attention to it and make more of an effort.

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I read an extremely little amount of rereads, which is honestly kind of confusing? I thought I reread a lot? A more accurate statement probably is that I used to reread a lot, or at least the last couple of years. With me reading a lot more ebooks recently, I don’t tend to run out of reading material. I also think I just didn’t want to re-read books because there were so many I didn’t know yet and was interested in. However, re-reading is so comforting and I actually love it, so that number will probably go up next year.

(I knew I read a lot on my phone, but that it was this much was very surprising! I thought it would be more equally divided between ebooks and printed ones.)

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Figuring out what genres I read was a pain in the ass. I’m all over the place, but only in extremely small quantities. Save for contemporary, obviously. Which isn’t even my favourite genre (or so I thought?) but YA contemporary is the most dedicated to writing diversely. Which means it’s not that surprising I reach for it often. I’m hoping SF/F isn’t that far behind!

And because I love data (and SF/F) I made a specific breakdown for that too. (Honestly, I wanted to do that in my original genre chart, but then nothing stood a chance against contemporary, so 😂)

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My favourite graphics! Yes! I’m happy I managed to read plenty of diverse books, though I might try to go for 75% next year. I only (mainly) counted books as diverse if the main character or love interest fell into one of the specific categories. Once they did, though, I took note of all representation, also in side characters.
For instance, the main character in The Upside of Unrequited is fat and Jewish. Neither she nor her LI is queer, but many side characters are. So after counting it as diverse it also counted for the LGBTQIAP+ category and is one of those 54 books. (Are you with me?)

You’ll notice that in my Types of Diversity chart, I didn’t use percentages. I didn’t forget them. Out of the 70+ diverse books I read, these are the amounts that featured a character with said type of diversity. Percentages were too confusing for me since I didn’t know what would happen to books that had multiple types of representation 😊

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Tadaaaaa! I will work on a post with questions, favourites, disappointments and more about the specific books I read too! I hope to have it by tomorrow or the day after, I just didn’t want to overwhelm y’all. So I’m leaving this one with only data and stats!
Do you collect data about your reading, or do you think it's not worth the energy?

Comments

I really enjoyed reading this post! It was very interesting :) I also want to read as many diverse books as possible, but I really need to work on my backlist books in 2018 as well, so I probably won't be able to read as many as I'd like... I hope 2018 is going to be an amazing year for you and I hope you'll read tons of amazing books! <3